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100 Years of Radio
kubla2000 writes: "As CNN dutifully reports, January 23 marks the anniversary of the first long distance radio transmission by Guglielmo Marconi thereby crediting him as the inventor of the radio. I spend a fair bit of time in Poland and was surprised to hear on a children's television quiz show that there were two correct answers to the question, "Who is the father of radio". The other correct answer, was Alexander Popov. Still others would argue that the true father of radio was
Nikola Tesla. So in fact, we're witnessing something between the 100th and the 107th anniversary of the birth of radio. Whichever it is, I think that human ingenuity has shown remarkable progress in the last century. From the crystal set and the cat's whisker to IP. Quite something."
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This post reminded me of an issue that I haven't seen discussed very much. The US FCC was created to regulate all areas of communications including radio. The original reason for licensing transmitters was to ensure that they did not interfere with each other. Lately (sometime within the past 20 years or so), they have adopted the attitude that they *OWN* the natural resources, and have been auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder for billions of dollars a pop. This just doesn't seem right.
We should all take a lesson from Nikolai Tesla, because he was a prominent geek in his day. Yes another poster bemoaned people like me who would assert that Edison was a bastard, but it's true! Well I don't know about the bastard part, but he acted like one.
Nobody talks anymore about what this man did, because he wasn't a blatant opportunist. Marconi was credited with radio because he made it an event. Marconi was a showman first, inventor second. Edison, Bill G. and Steve J. are from the same mold, exploiting the inventions of others as their own.
In 100 years, will Bill Gates be credited with inventing what then will be referred to as a computer? How about Jobs, for "inventing" the iMac? More startling, will Al Gore be heralded as the father of the internet? Doubtful, but all of these 'events' have made more splashes in the mainstream media than Linux, xBSD, RMS, ESR, K&R or anyone else who shook the geek universe.
So be opportunistic!
My 2 cents.
-- Len
Another cool site devoted to Bose: http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Your story about Edison and the electric chair is generally correct. However, Edison's main enemy in the AC/DC battle was George Westinghouse. At that time, cities were trying to decide what type of electrical power system to deploy. IIRC, the IEEE Spectrum magazine had an article about this about 10 yrs ago (Edison and the Electric Chair).
Your story about Edison and the electric chair is generally correct. However, Edison's main enemy in the AC/DC battle was George Westinghouse. At that time, cities were still trying to decide what type of electrical power system to deploy. IIRC, the IEEE Spectrum magazine had an article about this about 10 yrs ago (Edison and the Electric Chair).
I for one am glad the the poor misunderstood ubergeek Tesla is not alive today. Otherwise he would be e-mailing stories about himself to Jon Katz.
Creation myths are powerful. For whatever reason, we need to point to some man and say, "_He_ invented radio (telegraphy, the light bulb, baseball, &c.)" The truth with all of these things is that there was no moment of invention--but there's no glamor to that. Nationalism, I think, has much to do with the invention of creation myths as well. Abner Doubleday was trumped up as the fictitious "inventor" of baseball, because the fiction perpetuated the notion that baseball was uniquely American in origin, and not a derivative of ball games from across the Atlantic. Similarly, the acclamation of Samuel Morse as the inventor of telegraphy overlooks the innovation of the British Wheatstone; and it was also a Brit, Joseph Swan, and not Thomas Edison, who conceived of the idea of putting an incandescent carbon filament in a vacuum to make the first light bulb. hyacinthus.
Actually it might happen. Any time you have two different cunduction meterials, a sounding board, and an attenna you can recieve AM type radio transmissions. True story: a gentleman had a cheap folding table that would recieve a local AM station that had an antenna nearby. You had to be really quite but you could hear a garbled voice. It is speculated that the rusted joints of the table legs were enough of a semi conductor to rectify the signal. It was very weird.
Oof. Crediting Lee DeForest and leaving out Edwin Armstrong? DeForest may have "invented" the vacuum triode, but Armstrong was the first man who figured out what could be done with it (e.g. regenerative amplification, the "superheterodyne" receiver, frequency modulation.) DeForest's chief innovation is a familiar one--he learned how to sue everyone in sight to gain credit for things he didn't invent.
hyacinthus.
The day most often quoted as the begining of radio is December 12, 1901. On this day at the 12th hour Marconi received the first transatlantic transmission and is celebrated widely as the birth of radio proper. Read more here http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~jcraig/marconi.html and here http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716 ,63990+1+62410,00.html?query=radio
Tesla invented radio. Marconi made his fortune on Tesla's patents.
PBS recently aired a documentary on Tesla -- you can view the Web site here: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ .
Everyone said Tesla was crazy when he said you could generate AC power from Niagara Falls. They are the first installation of hydroelectric power anywhere in the world.
Tesla is the king (and the USA stole his "deathray" plans). They're also working on another weapon he designed.
In short, Tesla was robbed.
"My friends at school and I always thought Britney Spears invented radio." -Jenny Dolenz, age 15, San Marino High School
About Tesla, Popoff, Hertz, maxwell, Righi and other scientits that have pioneered the field
of radio transmission, there is the fact that
they never build a long distance system with
a transmitter and a receiver.
Other experimenters made things to be used
in a laboratory, and almost not useful in
real life.
Marconi, in fact invented the antenna (guess
why the term is the same in italian and english?)
especially the transmitting antenna.
Popoff experimented on antennas user with receiver, but never built a transmitter.
Mike (from Italy... Am I a bit biased, isn't it?)
There is nothing to argue about.
The US Patent Office even agrees....
Marconi's patents were overturned in favour of Tesla.
Yet again, we encounter the ugly spectre of the Great Radio Controversy.
Yet again, we see confusion and uncertainty over matters historical- uncertainties which should not remain yet do because of our own willing embrace of ignorant but easily repeated lies and distortions.
How is it that in this enlightened era, so many still are confused as to who deserves the credit for the invention of radio?
How have we come to this?
Tragically, it is that very few people living today were brave enough to face the ridicule of their peers and plop down $15 to buy the 1991 album "Psychotic Supper" by a group of self-educated historians with big-metal-hair. A band named after a genius. A band called Tesla.
I think that by posting the lyrics to their song "Edison's Medicine (Man Out Of Time)" here on slashdot this very day, I will once and for all clear up any confusion as to who really invented radio. I will forever end the debate. I find great comfort in the knowledge that the truth will finally be known, and that I will no longer be ashamed to name this CD amongst my collection.
Edison's Medicine (Man Out Of Time)
You're guilty of crime in the first degree,
Second and third as well.
My jury finds you'll be serving your time
When you go straight to hell.
'Cause he was Lord of the Lightning,
Though "socially fright'ning",
But never out to sell.
Their nickels and pence
Meant more than did sense,
And not the sensible thing.
Nor did the man outta time, man outta time.
Thought you was crazy. You was one of a kind.
Man outta time, man outta time.
All along, world was wrong. You was right.
All that he saw, all he conceived,
They just could not believe.
Steinmetz and Twain were friends that remained,
Along with number three.
He was electromagnetic, completely kinetic,
"New Wizard of the West."
But they swindled and whined that he wasn't our kind,
And said Edison knew best.
He was the man outta time, man outta time.
Thought you was crazy. You was one of a kind.
Man outta time, man outta time.
Said you was outta your mind!
You took a shot and it did you in.
Edison's medicine.
You played your cards, but you couldn't win.
Edison's medicine.
I spent twelve years of hard time,
More like the best years of my life.
Never heard or read a single word
About "the man" and his "wicked mind."
They'll sell you on Marconi.
Familiar, but a phony.
Story goes they sold their souls
And swore that you'd never know...
About the man outta time, man outta time.
Thought you was crazy. You was one of a kind.
Man outta time, man outta time.
Swore you was outta your mind!
You took a shot and it did you in.
Edison's medicine.
You played your cards, but you couldn't win.
Edison's medicine.
Now we have to listen to the freaks come out and talk about
...
What a bastard Edison was
Well... considering that Edison wanted power transmitted as DC, and Tesla wanted AC, i'd say that Edison is a bastard. Think of the clunkier mess we'd have for powerlines if we used DC. Damn.
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
Sometime we need the kooks to remind us to go back and look at some of the really cool stuff perople did though. Some of the most elegant solutions rely on very basic principals and technology. Radio, magnetic levitation, wireless control. Who'da thunk that these would have been done in the days of the gaslight?
------------------------
------------------------
Jack not name, jack job!
Can you imagine? Because of those backwards times, we're all benefiting from the invention of radio and there aren't royalty checks going ANYWHERE!
Thank God for HDTV. Finally, content control over airwaves. And it only took 100 (or 107) years!
...no matter who invented it or how old it really is - I still love to listen to radio. Both at home and abroad, and Im abroad a lot !!! When travelling its nice to tune in to the news from home, and when at home its nice to tune in to exotic station from abroad (all of course on shortwave that is). I often work in places that dont even have electricity, let alone internet access - my portable shortwave receiver never failed me. Call me oldfashioned or romantic, but ther just is something to tuning through the static and finding a familiar voice or sign/on tune just prior to the start of a program, and IMHO, radio gives you a much better take on whats going on in the world than just watching your local cable channel...
The Smithsonian's exclusion of Tesla has more to do with Edison's legacy than to do with secretive applications for Tesla's work.
Edison's estate and the philathropic foundations he started are high up on the donor list for the Smithsonian. You don't piss off your big money makers. That's why the statue mentioned in the link you gave above is currently displayed in a side hallway to a restroom at the Museum of American History.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Heinrich Hertz: Hertz lived from 1857 to 1894 and was the first to demonstrate experimentally the production and detection of Maxwell's waves. This discovery of course lead directly to radio. [more..]
Guglielmo Marconi: The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, repeated Hertz's experiments and eventually succeeded in getting secondary sparks over a distance of 30 feet (nine meters). [more..]
Nikola Tesla: Inventions related to radio ( the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla) X-rays, the vacuum tube amplifier. [more..]
Lee De Forest: American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. [more..]
Ernst F. W. Alexanderson: The engineer whose high-frequency alternator gave America its start in the field of radio communication. [more..]
It seems we can't truly give credit to any ONE inventor. For without all of the above, and countless others, I'm sure, radio and many other innovations would not be where they currently are. Hope these links help.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing."
Westinghouse was using mostly Tesla's inventions. In fighting Westinghouse, Edison was in a proxy battle with Tesla. In the end, Tesla essentially gave his patents away to Westinghouse to keep them from going under.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I think that the nature of invention has long been misunderstood. There's a tendency to look at a technological breakthrough and see the incremental improvement that put a concept over the top, rather than long buildup to that point. The credit goes to the person who brought an idea into prominance, rather than the people who laid the groundwork. In that sense it's rather odd that the Soviets were as eager to promote their national hero as the true inventor of whatever as anyone, given the Marxist view of history as the result of broad trends rather than individual initiative.
It's interesting to consider whether the concept of patents, in which an inventor is allowed to profit greatly from his inventions, has contributed to the heroic view of invention or was a product of it. It certainly motivates inventors to try to claim as much of an invention as their as they can possibly get away with!
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Tesla kicks ass that is all there is to it. All others are damned wussy boys.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Nathan B. Stubblefield, the Philo T. Farnsworth of Radio, of Murray Kansas, demonstrated his
wireless *voice* communications in 1885. That's a full three years before Hertz proof that radio waves existed, and nine years before Marconi's wireless telegraph. There are good records of
Stubblefield's work from 1892, when he showed it
to Dr. Rainey T. Wells; who also happened to be an attorney.
He demonstrated the device for hundreds of people, even a wireless ship-to-shore
demonstration from a riverboat on the Potomac in 1902.
He even got a patent, #887357, May 12, 1908, for the "radiotelephone device."
Tell me again why Marconi is widely credited with
"inventing radio" whereas Stubblefield died broke?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I think the main reason Tesla isn't in the books is because he was kind of quiet, and did science for the sake of science, not for the sake of getting famouse.
Edison was an egomaniac, so was marconi.. so they make it into history. Tesla never built a huge empire on his inventions, he just licensed his technology out and quietly worked on more stuff.
And of course there is reluctance now for any institution to 'change the story of history' they've been telling for so long....
Marconi started a transmission station in Galway, Ireland in 1904 or so. He had previously made the first trans-Atlantic transmission in 1901, from New Foundland to Cornwall.
I had the good fortune to interview his daughter, Elettra, in Galway, in 1995. At that point, we were actually close to the 100th anniversary of the transmission by Marconi over a distance of 1 mile, which first occurred in either 1895 or 1896 (can't remember exactly).
Regarding the claims of others, such as Tesla, I think that radio is a mix of several items:
wireless transmission
communication
and so I would think Marconi's claim to the title is reasonable.
Andrew
I'd rather go down in familiar flames than be lost in that endless blue.
Radio has an intimacy, based on all of the associations humans have with the voice and the spoken word, that television and the Net can't surpass.
Actually, Television broadcasts use radio waves in the VHF and UHF Radio bands. And now Sprints wireless broadband service spread spectrum microwave bands. And what could be more intimate than the internet? Not a one way medium.
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them, One OS to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them, in the land of
All this happened -before- Marconi's own work was reported in the literature.
Worth a look to any historian wanting to set tht record straight on this tidbit of techonology history.
Do we have a radio historian in the audience...?
Ask some people off the street who invented the automobile, and most of them will tell you it was Henry Ford. It's easier to remember this (false) factoid than to remember more obscure names and histories, which is why the Ford-invented-the-automobile meme is a fitter replicator than alternative memes representing accounts closer to reality.
By this principle, it's not unreasonable that in 50-100 years' time, most people will believe that Bill Gates invented the Internet (or whatever it's called then).
Tesla had the same experience. He arrived in America, went to Edison, who told him, basically, to screw off. They met again (as competitors) when people were trying to decide whether to adopt AC or DC current for electrical distribution networks. Tesla was trumpeting his AC model, with simple generators, motors, and transformers, as well as better distribution characteristics, while Edison was pushing DC for city-wide distribution. Edison even went so far as to hire local kids to steal neighborhood pets so he could electrocute them in an AC-based rig, to show the dangers of AC power.
To put it in a more modern perspective (though I may be reaching a bit here), Edison was Bill Gates, and Tesla was Steve Jobs. One was a much better promotor, marketer, and perhaps engineer, while the other was a more powerful visionary, thinker, and inventor.
gotta be more than 100... not sure why this is such a big deal
I don't think that Tesla gets the credit he deserves for anything...including Alternating Current (AC), so...he should get credit for the radio to make up for the things he doesn't get credit for.....that makes sense...doesn't it? Maybe? even a smidgen? darn.
The anti-salmon
I've lost the link, but the USSC recognises Tesla as the inventor of Radio. There's a lot more to the mess than you'd think.
:D
Of course, If you have Tesla's album Great Radio Controversy, read the liner notes.
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
No matter who invented it, I am definitely thankful for it.
Radio has an intimacy, based on all of the associations humans have with the voice and the spoken word, that television and the Net can't surpass. It is also a low-cost technology that anyone can learn to use for communication.
I can listen to National Public Radio and hear all the news I want without having to train my eyes on one location, or hear (many) ads. I especially like the BBC world service when I am pulling an allnighter.
I participated in a live webradio broadcast at the Independent Media Center in Cincinnatti, and people from Prague, Los Angeles and London tuned in.
This is a cheap, ubiquitous technology that is easy to learn to use. I also had a low power (40 watt) FM transmitter with a few co-conspirators, we attached a 20 foot antenna to a 6 story building and reached 3 counties.
The FCC which has long kept the airwaves private, "legalized" low power FM but made the paperwork and technological threshholds insurmountable for community and home users. We want real free radio.
Tahing it further, the FCC screwed shit up royally when it allowed the same person to own radio stations and TV stations in the same market. Monopoly ownership breeds..well, what you probably have on most of your dial-
Top forty, Christian, country, and crap.
Patronize independently owned, low power, nonprofit and community radio and cable access TV in your town.
Goat sex free since 2001
As far as I can tell it died years ago. Even the CBC doesn't have the regulars (Gzowski and Gabarough (SP?) that used to make it shine. As for music, well, maybe in the UK where they seem to play something more than Creed 23 hours a day.
If you count downloading BBC Essential Mix broadcasts and listening to digitallyimported.com as "radio," then yes, it's alive and well. But as for the old "radio-frequency transmission" public broadcasting idea, it's rather dead.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
Also, yesterday was the 100th of Queen Victoria's death. How's that for the end of the Victorian era: her death one day, the first successful long distance radio transmission the next?
If nothing else, it's fun to speculate about such things. As I said, take it with a huge grain of salt.
Free Hans!
I'd just like to clarify before the flamers start in that I am fully aware that something like this probably wouldn't actually happen and that music was probably not the first thing transmitted. But, such considerations make the joke less funny. So, just enjoy the joke for what it is, and leave the logistics to real life.
-- Gordon Worley
Broadcasting power over long distances
What a bastard Edison was
How Tesla could have split the world in half or produced earthquakes or some such rot
How the government dicked him over
Great... yawn...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Ever since medieval times we have been throwing these conceptions out of the window, and creating in a no nonsense, take-no-prisoners style.
If we are to continue in this vein, we must make sure that nothing is sacred.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
3 people claimed inventing radio at different time.
How many people will claim inventing radio button
in the next 100 years ?
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
...for the first time, a man with a metal plate in his head said: "Where is that music coming from!?!".
-- Gordon Worley
the page on patents is especially interesting. For example, he invented a radio remote control mechanism for a boat in 1898!
I tend to side with Tesla on this as far as the radio question goes. These paragraphs from the soon to be slashed website on Tesla perhaps summarize it best:
Despite the fact that almost every book mentions Guglielmo Marconi as the inventor of radio, the only thing Marconi did seems to be nothing more than reproducing apparati Nikola Tesla had registered years ago. Marconi copied Tesla, made some modifications, built a large industry producing radio devices in Europe and spent huge amounts to advertise his supposed invention.
Nine months after Tesla's death, the Supreme Patent Court of the USA decides that Nikola Tesla must be considered the father of wireless transmission and radio. Justifying its decision the court notes that in Marconi's related Patent (Íï. 764772 of 1904) there is nothing new not having been earlier published and registered by Tesla. The Court considered Marconi's claim that he did not knew of Tesla's patents false
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It seems to me, after reading the posts so far, that most nerds give Tesla the credit. At least some people remember this great man whose life and death are both equally mysterious. Check out some great files, courtesy of parascope.com, here or specifically, here. Any geeks want to comment on the system in the second article? It would seem good in theory, but are there any complications that might be unforseen? We need more research into some of Tesla's work.
Pax Digitalia
For a true Geek Experience, go HERE:
http://users.ids.net/~newsm/
The New England Wireless and Steam Museum is Rhode Island's Best Kept Secret when it comes to old technology. The 1907 Massie Station is the _oldest existing wireless station in the world_.
If you're a machinist or engineer or radio junkie, The tune-ups and steam-ups are not to be missed.
In the words of IEEE: "the origin and first major use of the solid state diode detector devices led to the discovery that the first transatlantic wireless signal in Marconi's world famous experiment was received by Marconi using the iron-mercury-iron coherer with a telephone detector invented by Sir J.C.Bose in 1898".
You can find more stuff at here
Well, a search on Jagdish Chandra Bose on Google shows a lots of links which confirm this statement.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
I bet that if the scientists of 100 years ago had the tiny components we use, they would have been able to put them together into the kinds of toys we have today.
You see software and hardware hackers swaggering around like they are responsbile for the new wave of technology. Don't kid yourself - all hail the materials scientist, who shrinks the bits that build the future.
Whoa, three people claiming to have invented the radio. Good thing that we can tell our children that all the credit for invention of the Internet goes to Al Gore alone.
gotta be more than 100... not sure why this is such a big deal
It's not! That's what's so incredible.
But if that's incredible, consider that from Kittyhawk to Apollo 11 was only, what, 66 years?
Yeah, from first flight to the moon. 66 years.
IP is impressive, and spread spectrum RF is cool. Cellphones are amazing.
But radio pales in comparison.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
About a year ago (sorry, I have only a paper clipping, if that), the Wall Street Journal ran an article on "facts" in Microsoft Encarta - usually the names of inventors - which varied by translation. The French translation preferred French, the Italian edition Italians, and so on. There weren't a lot of examples, just such judgement calls: radio, the light bulb, the airplane etc.
In another well-known case (was it Windows 95?), the time zone control panel included a map which showed the border between India and Pakistan. This is a disputed border, so Microsoft was caught in a no-win situation. I think they got rid of the map.
Yep. and the gov't didn't like Tesla too much, so they got rid of him and his facilities.
You know, Tesla came to the USA to harness the hydroelectric power (as we know it now) at Niagra Falls. He was the first, afaik, to output AC power from a hydro source as great as the Falls.
But hey, I'm just rambling.
--
The telegraph was the first lightspeed global
information media. Everything since has been
an elaboration. The culmination will be personal
interactive video everywhere with seamless communication
between humans and vast computer media databases.
This expected to be fully implemented about two
centuries after the telegraph.
Tesla held the patents for the product that chump Guglielmo Marconi was using... Tesla just didn't have the business mind to rush radio to market. He was working on his grander visions of wireless power transmission. As Tesla said, "good luck to Marconi, he's using seventeen of my patents." In fact in 1943, when the US Supreme court reverses an older decision, strikes down the Marconi patents, and awards priority to Tesla, #645,576.
It's actually kinda disturbing that they would even put that "other guy" as the inventor. It's been widely held as fact that Tesla invented radio for the past 60 years. Yet still the old saying that "history is written by the winners". Still remains to be true, even on slashdot.
Does anyone still listen to shortwave radio? I got one as a christmas gift and haven't had much time to play with it yet. With the advent of online sound streams, I imagine SW is starting to fall by the wayside?
I think your analogy is messed up. Edison was probably Gates, and Tesla was probably Wozniak or that Flowers guy in WWII that invented the first computer (well, British one at least...shortly before the Neumann bombes/collossus, etc.).
Tesla gets way too little credit. Really, how many times is he mentioned in your average high school American history text book? Yet we fawn over Edison, who may have been smart, but was greedy, corrupt, and basically a mean person. Alas, that is usually the way it goes with American history.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Shoot, the idea of flight goes back to the myth of Icarus flying too close to the sun. When was the first concept of radio transmission?
Somebody in the 1830's must have thought, "this telegraph is great, but could we do this without wires?"
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
He was the one to discover the principle that allows you to transcieve on a single antenna, did the first broadcasts of Morse Code accross the Atlantic, and did the first voice broadcasts. If you don't beleive me check out this bio (about half way down near the image of the alternator) http://www.kwarc.on.ca/hammond/fessenden-bio.html or search Google for Reginald A. Thessenden and you will get some very good sites right off the bat.
right arm, brutha!
illegitimii non ingravare
A good book about Tesla is Tesla: Man out of Time, by Margeret Cheney.
with a Slashdot poll to determine who *really* invented radio:
* Marconi
* Tesla
* Edison
* Popov
* CowboyNeal
* The little green men who have been transmitting their signals straight into my brain.
* God
* Pulsars (the stars, not the watch company)
* Pulsra (the watch company, not the stars)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Since when is Intellectual Property one of the greatest achievements of mankind?
Note for humor impaired: above is a joke.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
...it just shows, that you can always improve upon science. Had he believed that radio waves cannot be transmitted over the horizon, we probably would have waited a lot longer for radio. Similarly, had not radio hams been pushed off the so-called usable frequency bands to shortwaves, it would have taken many more years to find out that shortwaves are very well suited for intercontinental communication. The suits at the time, just as at Marconis, considered shortwaves as useless...were they ever wrong !!!
Testla was obviously the inventor of radio. Of course, he does not recieve credit for it. :( He also does not recieve credit for many other very useful inventions he created. Alternating Current and multiplex telegraphy to name a few. There are many other inventions that did not even take off. It was all because of politics, though. Which was terrible because his Tesla Coil had many useful applications. He claimed that it could be used to transfer voice, power, and pictures. If it can transfer pictures, then it would be capable of acting as a sort of Internet. So, had his inventions not been ignored because people were afraid of them, we would have like a 100 year advance on the progress of the Internet. But I don't know. I read his biography and many other resources about him, but I seem to be the only one who made that analysis of using the Tesla Coil for Internet access. You have to admit this much, though: Tesla was screwed over on many, many things. Pretty much every person who had any power was against him. Especially Edison; otherwise known as the patent pirate of Menlo Park...
one day we may stop worshipping inventors, leaders... and come to realize that we are all in this together. we build upon other's ideas, without which there would be very little progress. yes, inventors and even leaders can be special, but it is strange how certain ideas often manifest themselves in different places at the same general time.
I'm from Newfoundland, so there was a focus on Marconi in my school.
:-)*
Marconi is so often credited because he went farther with it. He crossed the Atlantic ocean. He started a successful company.
It didn't matter that Tesla experimented and Popov deployed remote lightning detectors before any of this because Marconi started a company. It's not who does the initial work, it's who profits from it, at least to the general populace.
Hey, we should call Bill Gates the father of computing. He has lots of money.
Actually, in a similar vein, the real father of modern radio is often forgotten as well. Until Reginald Fessenden, radio was only dits and dahs. This Canadian guy was the first to transmit normal sound.
Fessenden wanted to work for Thomas Edison, who basically told him to screw off. A full bio can be read here.
Telsa's patents were upheld (and Marconi lost) by the US Supreme Court in 1945. It's not really in question.
Marconi only had patents for a receiver or transmitter (I forget which) anyhow they decided that since tesla had both a way of receiving and transmitting he should get the patent.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
A few points: :) ).
* Voice communication was invented by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.
* Yes, Nickola Tesla invented radio transmission, but not originally for communications, he found that electricity could be transfered through air.
* I am fairly sure that Marconii only really came onto the scene in the 1930's, and when he put in a patent for wireless radio transmissions, he found out that a patent already existed, and by that time, had passed. (correct me if I am wrong - with proof)
* Eddison and Tesla knew each other, Tesla solved one of his Eddison's problems with wide-spread power distribution, Tesla had invented the use of radio signals over wires (50 or 60 cycles (or Hertz) a second), but Tesla wanted too take it further, Eddison didn't want a bar of this, and that is why we use the radio waves for communications, and not for power.
* Tesla also found it hard to sell his ideas, the only way to compare this to what business if like these days is Eddison can be compared too Microsoft, and Tesla could be compared too Amiga, in the context of money, ideas, popularity & know-how (although, if Amiga gets anywhere in the next few years, thia analogy will be wrong, I have crossed fingers
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
How can you subscribe to any belief at all and call yourself existentialist? It seems clear that you don't know what the word means.
Al Gore.
-- Alastair
Seems the idea was in the air, so to speak ...
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Often forgotten because he is not from the west, Sir J.C.Bose needs mention. His work was older than Marconi's. A selfless man, he said that he is not interested in commercial telegraphy and that others can use his research work. Compare with the money hungry, hyped up scientists of today. You can read more on him here. Science didn't start in the west and didn't flourish only there either.
While I believe that Tesla invented radio, it seems the U.S. government had a more practical reason for recognizing Tesla as radio's inventor. After the war, the Marconi company sought patent royalties for all government's radios. The Court's ruling, uh, squelched that in one stroke.
Whoa.. Radio is 100 years old, eh? Well, Radio Waves are awesome. They opened communication completely while the telephone still had time to play catchup. Radio waves are all around you.. From the Baby Transmitters you got to keep out burgulars to the 2.4Ghz wireless phone your girlfriend got you for christmas, Radio rocks! I mean, with radio you can do all sorts of things...
Commit Crimes.. Go Shopping.. Confirm an EBay bandit... There are even continuous chess games played over shortwave. To radio, I take my hat off.
Seeka
Another interesting link is the files that FBI supposedly has collected.
http://foia.fbi.gov/tesla.htm
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard